Are the catalogs sometimes found
at the back of the book block important?

The back-of-book catalog is often the most reliable way to date the printing of the book. This is particularly important when you want to verify that the book is a first edition. (Some books with first edition slugs were NOT in fact real first printings.)

To learn how to tell the date of a book using the back-of-book catalog, see Barry Neavill's Modern Library Dating Key, 1925-1970 elsewhere on ModernLib.

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